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Luckily, advertising isn't the only thing that makes the marketing world go round. Remember public relations? Yup. And while public relations (or, as today's buzzword dictionary would have it, earned media) won't necessarily solve a starving publisher's problems, it will help get a marketer's word out to market by circumventing ad blockers.
So too will content marketing and native advertising (which will help publishers stay afloat). Writing in an Advertising Age article entitled "The Solution to Ad Blocking Is to Double-Down on Earned Media," Edelman Chief Content Strategist Steve Rubel wrote: "We may look back on this time as the beginning of the great era of earned media." ...
Most brands, by now, recognize the power of social media and understand it's not just a passing fad. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would have the third-highest population, behind China and India. And more people these days own a mobile device than a toothbrush.
Erik Qualman, author of "Socialnomics" and the creator of the popular video series of the same name, has released a new clip filled with fascinating social media stats and how marketers are using this to reach out to consumers....
TThe story of how a small family business pulled off one the biggest successes in YouTube history....
..We had to scale a content marketing effort quickly and decided that Stephen’s primary source of “rich content” would be video. He was a natural on camera and the lush and ancient countryside of Provence proved to be an ideal backdrop to explore wine making, food. history, art and local color of the region.
Stephen was in it for the long haul and consistently documented his wine-making journey in a very human and entertaining way. He talked about a labeling crisis that almost crushed his business. He created a funny video about the ridiculous paperwork he faced from the French government, what it was like to attend a wine-tasting competition, how the grapes were harvested in the first morning sunlight, and many other interesting little vignettes. He shined a light on his village, his pets, his family. He lost his balance on a grape harvester. He put a human and modern face to a stodgy, traditional business....
Do people quoted in newspapers review the stories before they run? Can advertisers legally lie? Are PR people the biggest liars of all? How much does it cost to get a story into The Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star?
Just a few questions that show people do not understand public relations.
As with many social media marketing practices, blog syndication is an effective tool but has the potential to result in certain disadvantages as well. The main aim should be based on finding a balance between the pros and cons and assess the potential positive impact of blog syndication on your overall blogging strategy....
...The business side of Facebook boomed in the personality of a Facebook brand page. This serves as the go-to social marketing move for every brand out there, no matter how big or small. Imagine posting your latest marketing pitch in real time and being able to target your consumers by using insight provided on your Facebook brand page. I recently watched a tutorial video from Hootsuite that featured Jason Li. It was all about how you can build a strong, effective Facebook brand page. Let me share with you the things I learned after watching this video. These four steps may sound cliche to some people, but as the old saying goes “the simplest answer is usually the right one.” Allow me to discuss this briefly. I would love to hear your suggestions for building a strong Facebook brand page....
A form of advertising that is so tightly interwoven within the site it’s being promoted on that customers can’t tell that it’s advertising. Pop quiz: Can you spot the native advertising on BuzzFeed’s homepage? If you answered “all of it,” you’d be exactly right. The entire front page, seemingly devoted to Instagrammers you should be following, actually is a huge advertisement for Samsung cameras. Surprised? Shocked? Amused? Betrayed? All of these emotions are felt by viewers when they realize they’ve been fed advertising in what they thought was an article purely devoted to entertainment or getting more out of a photography hobby. Native ads don’t yet have a clear definition, but at their simplest, they are a form of advertising that is so tightly interwoven within the site it’s being promoted on that customers can’t tell that it’s advertising. Different technologies have tried to paint native ads under names like sponsored listings, promoted posts, or online advertorials, but there are some definite differences....
...Incorporating a “content readiness” workstream at the front end of a project can yield tremendous long-term business benefits. The planning stage for content is critical to move forward with an experience that exceeds user expectations and moves the business closer to its goals. That means understanding existing content, identifying missing ingredients, and building a new data model. This is the Holy Grail for content today. How can we plan for the presentation of content if we do not know on what device it might be rendered? Removing the presentation layer leaves some teams dumbfounded. We’ve been dependent on visualizing and formatting content to a singular or two-dimensional form for so long that thinking about it any other way is daunting. But the reality is we are already living in a platform agnostic world. And we’re behind our own evolution....
Last year was a great year for content marketing, one that saw it established as a key discipline as brands looked to create a genuine rapport with their target audience. And there were big names leading the charge; the likes of Coca-Cola and Red Bull both embed content strategy as an integral part of their overall marketing strategy. Of course, with this new-found celebrity status comes a greater spotlight, and there are a number of key recurring themes and trends that marketers and brand owners need to get to grips with, if they are to really push forward with their content marketing strategies for 2013: 1. Content marketing is no longer a fad… so get your strategies in order...
In 2013, companies and entrepreneurs cannot just self-promote and expect audiences to buy their products or hire them for their skills. If you want to stand out from the competition, you have to show off your skills in different ways: - By producing relevant articles, videos, pictures, etc - By sharing other people’s great content Creating content is a great thing, but there are only 24 hours in a day, and inspiration is not always around the corner. However, you still need to find an alternative way to serve your audience. That’s where content curation comes into play....
The winners of the first-ever PR Daily Digital PR and Social Media Awards are diverse—they include a couple of nonprofits, one of the world’s largest automakers, several PR firms, a casino, an airline, and a bitchin’ kitchen.
Despite their differences, all of the winners share a common trait: They were bold.
Whether it was a tech company’s bold attempt to hijack its competitor’s conference or a nonprofit communicator’s bold reporting trip to the Horn of Africa, the winners reveal a courageous streak among PR and marketing people in the digital age—it’s a brave new world, and they’re not afraid to dive in....
Jonathan Gottschal puts it well in the “Storytelling Animal” that history is a story we tell ourselves but its only from one viewpoint and the future is a story we tell ourselves that we want to come true. Phillip K Dick , the master of Sci Fi storytelling, said that reality is what you have left when stop believing in everything. Daniel Kahneman in his best seller “Thinking Fast and Slow” writes it best for me. He says that our brains have evolved to seek out stories to make what we see and experience understood. Story then is our central learning and reference system....
...“Content discovery became important with the rise of social media,” says Boštjan Špetič, CEO of Zemanta. “Suddenly, marketers didn’t understand how to reach customers because customers were bypassing traditional marketing channels and referring each other to content. Tools and analytics then tried to make this referral process predictable.” What does it all mean for content marketers? Here are five tips on how to use content discovery to connect with customers and increase your content marketing ROI...
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Back in 2007, when Twitter was taking off, the PR industry faced a pivot point. It was no longer effective to cold email as many journalists as possible....
What PR practitioners found was four key elements to getting their stories out there: - Tell a story
- Help journalists stand out among their competitors
- Create captivating content that customers and journalists are going to find valuable
- Do extensive research to find where the audiences are, and distribute your content there
In other words, they began doing content marketing. There are several other ways content marketing has changed the way we “do PR.” Here are a handful of examples:...
Virgin Atlantic Airways has always been a mover and shaker when it comes to image and innovation. Despite the fact that 2012 brought a £93m loss for the company, brand leaders at VA have continued to put their best face forward. A willingness to take risks, reinvent themselves, and remain relevant has resulted in one amazing campaign after another. Like “Flying in the Face of Ordinary":
VA realizes that the bulk of their customers purchase one or two flights with them per year, making it more important to continuously engage their audience in every possible way, digitally and in real life. Let’s look at four ways the brand has succeeded over the past year.
Real-time social media are transforming marketing and public relations. I recently visited two firms in Chicago that are responding to the need for speed within the flow of online conversationconversation.
...Content and storytelling are at the heart of how we help our clients build meaningful relationships with their audiences," said Mark Hass, president and CEO, Edelman U.S. Edelman's plan focuses on client partnerships with five U.S. newsrooms and one in the U.K.Edelman newsroom "trend spotters" identify trends and events, collaborate with account leaders and design creative concepts. Ideas are shared with clients, and then decisions are made about posting or not.Real-time PR and marketing content frequently is covered by traditional media -- television, radio, newspapers and magazines.
News organizations, too, are now in the business of conversation monitoring and engaging. In this sense, the news model shares with PR the goal of creating viral videos, flashy graphics, photographs, memes and other popular social media content. Everyone is competing for measurable engagement that may translate into new revenue....
...So we thought it was time to create a blog post that could serve as an inbound marketing glossary.
Now, I'm no math whiz, but when you try to make a glossary based on a topic with sub-categories that could be their own glossaries, well -- that’s a lot of gloss. So instead of throwing hundreds of terms at you from all those other glossaries, I narrowed this one down to the top 45 terms that are imperative to anyone learning inbound marketing. Yes, there will be debate on the imperative-ness of these terms. Yes, I did volunteer to write this seemingly daunting post. Yes, let’s start this darn glossary already....
Best social media, PR & content marketing picks
It's Friday and the best social media and PR picks are in. We've got a great lineup of irresistible highlights from the PR Coach Twitter feed.
This week, it seemed to be all about content marketing. Everyone’s talking about it. So we’ve got a bonus – a special collection of ten of the best insights into content marketing to share with you....
Retailers, take heed. This new trend in content marketing could make a big difference for your business. If you spend any time on Pinterest, you’ll quickly become aware that color boards are the hottest trend. If you spend any time on Pinterest, you’ll quickly become aware that color boards are the hottest trend. In my experience they do well on Facebook, too! A recent Saint Patrick’s Day Wedding Inspiration board that we posted on www.greenbrideguide.com got 173 likes and 15 shares within hours of posting. Our color board on Chevron Wedding Details got 172 likes and 15 shares. In general, our color board posts are outperforming our single image posts by a factor of 10x or more!...
Represented by the Inc 500, the highest growth small businesses get content marketing as a means to expand their reach and increase profitable sales when compared to their larger, more established Fortune 500 counterparts. These small business (SMB) organizations must be leaner and more effective at maximizing each aspect of their marketing mix to compete with larger, more complex firms. Content marketing helps them build trust by offering the type of promotion-free information their customers actively seek during the purchase process.
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth research, entitled "2012 Inc 500 Social Media Settles In" reveals that Inc 500 companies continue to blog at greater rates than their Fortune 500 peers. In 2012, 44% of the Inc 500 had a corporate blog, an increase of 7% from 2011. By contrast, 28% of the Fortune 500 had a blog in 2012. While this is an increase of 5% from 2011, the Fortune 500’s blogging rate still lags that of the Inc 500....
Are you looking to attract prospects, convert them to customers and keep them coming back? Then social media and content marketing are a match made in heaven. The key to success is to make the connection between content marketing and social media. Let’s look at the content needed to get your marketing to that lucrative intersection....
You may be in on the trend or you may be oblivious, but you’ve seen it, and you’ve probably been drawn in by it. Copious amounts of whitespace – large gaps between images and chunks of text, whether the background color is white or not – are appearing on more and more marketing materials. Why, you ask, and why should you care? Here, I’ll explain why....
As a fashion retailer that’s built its brand on aesthetics, Anthropologie is a company to watch on social media. With more than 250,000 followers on Instagram (not to mention 250,000 followers on Pinterest, 664,000 followers on Facebook, and 370,000 followers onTwitter), Anthropologie demonstrates by example how fashion retailers — and other brands —can generate strong communities online. Here’s a look at what the brand is doing well, along with ways you can follow its example to leverage Instagram to meet your content marketing goals. ...
With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog , in social media and forums. Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
How Inbound Marketing can help you? A. It saves you up to 62% of your marketing budget as Makes you stand out of your competition C. Helps to generate a massive amount of leads D. Gets you up to 55% higher lead conversion rates E. Increases your customers and sales...
According to a survey from the Wall Street Journal, Twitter has fallen out of favour with small businesses, preferring other channels like LinkedIn and YouTube. Despite it being the world’s fastest growing social platform at the moment, it seems that Twitter isn’t getting a lot of love from small businesses. A recent survey ran by the Wall Street Journal and Vistage International found that six out of ten small-business owners say they believe social media tools are valuable to their company’s growth. So far, so unsurprising, but what was particularly interesting wasn’t the fact that LinkedIn topped the survey, 41% said that it had the most potential to help their company, but only 3% of those surveyed felt that Twitter could do the same. The Wall Street Journal’s survey is worth looking at if you want an idea of how social media is used among small businesses in the U.S. (as well as having some nice interactive graphics to look at)....
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Could ad blockers rehabilitate PR?